World's First Invisible Skyscraper

One less thing to see on your gap year

Try getting your head around this: Seoul, the capital of South Korea, has announced plans to construct the world’s first invisible skyscraper. It’s going to be called Tower Infinity and is expected to be completed by 2014.

You’re right to treat this with suspicion.

Anyone who’s read The Emperor’s New Clothes will be aware of the pitfalls of pretending to see things that aren’t there. You can end up looking quite the fool. Especially if you happen to be an emperor. But it’s a bit more complex than that – allow us to explain.

The building’s ‘invisibility’ will – obviously – be an illusion, which will be created by thousands of LED screens spread all over the tower which will display real-time images of what would have been visible if the tower wasn’t there. Effectively, the building will be camouflaged. All 1,476ft of it.

It’s a dramatic departure from the current trend which certain cities have become alarmingly obsessed with in recent years – that is, creating structures so enormously imposing they’re visible with the naked eye from Pluto.

GDS Architects, who are in charge of producing Tower Infinity, have described it as an ‘anti-tower’, which “sets itself apart by celebrating the global community rather than focusing on itself”.